CPG manufacturers and retailers are increasingly interested in embedding sensor systems into real retail environments to study the interactions between shoppers, displays and products. The learnings from such studies yield valuable insights that can be applied to optimize product range, store layout, displays and the overall shopper experience.
A particularly useful sensor system includes pickup sensors measuring product pickups using weight sensors installed under each product facing in combination with motion sensors tracking the position and movement of shoppers in proximity to the installation.
The effective design of such a sensor system presents numerous practical challenges, including but not limited to how to analyze signals from weight sensors in order to identify true pickups vs. extraneous vibrations, how to identify and address anomalous store conditions that might lead to invalid data (for example, out of stocks, power failures, hardware failures, one or more sensors becoming blocked, excessive noise in sensors,), how to validate that a system has been installed and setup correctly, how to use the CTS to control and track the status of any powered merchandising devices being used in experiments (for example lighting, activated signage, audio loops, digital media screens), how to minimize vibration levels in the stand in order to reduce false positive readings, how to position motion sensors in order to most reliably and discretely detect position and motion of shoppers, how to maximize durability of motion sensors, how to capture supplemental video or still footage in response to conditions detected by the CTS, how to discretely and robustly conduct sensor signals to a data logger and how to facilitate addition or removal of sensors to a system to accommodate any desired planogram.
Therefore, a need exists to address the problems noted above and other problems previously experienced.